What Types of Personality Tests Are There?

A few of the most well-known personality tests are the Rorschach inkblot test and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. The first modern personality test was called the Woodworth Personal Data Sheet, designed to identify U.S. Army recruits who might be predisposed to shell shock. Other types of personality tests include those based around the Five Factor Model of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

The Rorschach test was created by Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach. During the test, a patient is shown a series of abstract inkblots and asked to describe their perception of the image. The descriptions are recorded and analyzed by a psychologist to arrive at some conclusions in regard to the patient’s personality characteristics and emotional function. It has been besieged by criticism as to its accuracy, but the Rorschach test is still in widespread use by psychiatrists in the U.S. as of 2015.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator was created by mother and daughter Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers. It is designed to assess the participant through their responses to statements or questions and thereby attribute Jungian psychological types to them. The final result gives a score in each of four dichotomies: intuition/sensing, perception/judging, feeling/thinking and introversion/extraversion. These scores are used to make conclusions about the participant’s personality traits. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is popular among business psychometric testing, though it suffers criticism from the vagueness of its conclusions.